


The Monster of Red Mountain

by DesertScribe



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Fighting, First Meetings, Monsters, Then Things Turn More Friendly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-26 14:07:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21375358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: Leighara goes hunting to distract herself from feeling down after a breakup.  The distraction she finds is not the one she was looking for, but she isn't going to protest.
Relationships: Adorable Monstergirl/Hunter Who Ignores Warnings Because She’s Cute, Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2019





	The Monster of Red Mountain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smarky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smarky/gifts).

Red Mountain was not really red. Its rocks and trees were the same ordinary shades of grey, brown, and green as anywhere else nearby. It had never been coated in blood by any great slaughter remembered in tales passed down from one generation to the next. Red Mountain's name was not a reminder or a warning. It was named for a coincidence of its positioning which in wintertime allowed it to be lit deep red by the setting sun long after all the surrounding mountains and valleys had been cloaked in evening shadows. Everyone who witnessed the sight appreciated its beauty.

And yet Red Mountain _was_ a place to be avoided now. It had not always been so, but in the past few decades people who wandered up its slopes had started to go missing, until nearly everyone living in sight of the mountain believed that it was home to a monster which not even the greatest of monster hunters could find and defeat. The few who did not believe in the presence of a monster believed the mountain to be generally cursed, though they could not say how or why such a curse could have come to be, just as those who believed in the monster could not say where it might have come from.

Leighara first heard stories of Red Mountain and its monster over twenty years ago when she was a small child sitting at her grandmother's knee. Leighara heard those same stories over and over through the years with only minor variations depending on who was doing the telling. Most recently, she had heard them again just before dawn that morning, as her grandmother begged her not to go searching for Selene, the miller's pretty daughter, who had gone missing three nights ago and rumor said had been seen sneaking out of the town gates in the direction of Red Mountain.

"I am not looking for her, Grandmother," Leighara said as she gently but firmly pried her grandmother's clutching fingers from the soft leather of her coat sleeve. "I'm just going hunting. With luck, I'll be back tonight with fresh venison for all of us."

"Whether you are looking for Selene or not, stay away from Red Mountain," her grandmother warned. "The monster is no fairytale."

"Hunger is no fairytale either, and there is nowhere else left to hunt," Leighara insisted, and it was no lie to say so. It was a drought year which promised to turn into a famine year all too soon. The more familiar hunting grounds favored by those living in and around the small town were already stripped almost bare as everyone sought to compensate for the expectations of a poor crop yield come harvest time. However, times were not yet so desperate that the average person was willing to risk setting foot on Red Mountain. Leighara was becoming desperate. It was not the desperation of hunger, not when the whole family had already carefully collected enough supplies to see them through to better times if they tightened their belts and didn't do anything extravagant, but hunger was an easier excuse to speak aloud than what was really driving her.

"The monster will devour you," her grandmother said.

"Let it try," Leighara said. And away she went with her bow and quiver full of arrows across her back and her long hunting knife almost big enough to be a short sword strapped against her thigh.

Despite most human hunters staying away from the place, there was little or no game on the slopes of Red Mountain. Leighara did not see so much as a rabbit track for all her skills and hours of searching. Even squirrels were few and far between and only chattered at her from the safety of high thick foliage where she could not take aim at them. Leighara kept up her futile hunt, though, because it was easier than going back to town where everything she looked at reminded her of Selene one way or another.

She was not searching for Selene. She did not need to search for Selene, because Selene had told her where she was going before she left: away from Leighara and into the arms of Cheralyn, a healer who lived in the next town. Leighara was not searching for Selene, because Leighara did not want to be the kind of person who went looking for her ex-girlfriend while in the mood to kill something.

She wanted to say that Cheralyn was a witch who had enchanted Selene away from her, but she knew that it was really just a matter of Cheralyn being slender with delicate hands and long flowing hair and prettily embroidered skirts voluminous enough to hide and extra person underneath, all of which Selene found far more appealing than Leighara, who was basically the opposite of all of those things. With that in mind, she kept her accusations to herself and instead went hunting on Red Mountain where she could be certain not to run into anyone who might offer attempts at consolatory comments or commiseration.

Unfortunately, with no quarry to stalk, Leighara's unoccupied mind kept circling back to Selene and Cheralyn. How could such a twig of a woman as Cheralyn function as a healer? How was she supposed to lift someone's arm to set a broken bone when she barely looked strong enough to lift her own hand without anything in it? Did she need to get someone to help her with the task? Would she need similar assistance in bed if she wanted to truly please Selene, who was a woman of vigorous and athletic appetites when it came to lovemaking? Or had those apparent appetites been as much a lie as when Selene said that she thought Leighara was pretty?

In the depths of her deepening spiral, Leighara wished she could meet the monster of Red Mountain for no other reason than the fact that a battle for survival against a massive beast trying to eat her might help keep her from being driven into insanity by her own gnawing thoughts.

As if the mountain sensed Leighara's desires and decided to answer them, Leighara heard the soft snap of a tiny twig being broken underfoot far too close for comfort. She had been walking with an arrow nocked and ready to be drawn back and let loose as soon as she found anything to bag for the stewpot, but even that was not enough to protect her. The monster was fast, amazingly fast. Even as everything seemed to slow down around Leighara as her fight or flight response kicked in, the monster moved fast enough that all Leighara could discern of it was countless dark eyes and a blur of long limbs and sharp horns pointing out in various directions. She only needed an instant to simultaneously pull back her bowstring as she spun to face her target, but that same instant was all that the monster needed to close the last of the distance between them and swat her bow and arrow aside before she could bring them to bear. The arrow went flying off somewhere Leighara couldn't spare the attention to track, and before she had the chance to draw another, the monster wrenched the bow out of her grasp and threw it aside.

Leighara grabbed for her hunting knife with one hand while attempting to punch the monster in the face with the other, but neither action accomplished anything. The punch only resulted in a sore hand as Leighara's knuckles landed against hard lumps of bone or horn hidden behind the curtain of hair which hung down wild in the monster's face, and the monster knocked her to the ground and pinned her flat on her back, one of its hands around her throat while the other clutched at her right wrist, preventing her from attacking with the blade. Leighara struggled but could not break free from the monster's iron grasp.

Leighara was not finished fighting yet, though, because her left hand, sore as it was, was still free. Punching the monster in the face had done more harm to herself than to the monster, so she abandoned that tactic. Instead, she tried to shove the monster away from her, which caused her to encounter the exact opposite situation of trying to punch the monster in the face. Leighara's fingers collided with and almost involuntarily wrapped themselves around something surprisingly yielding instead of the solid muscle and bone which she was expecting to find behind the monster's rough tunic of pelts as she thrust out her hand.

Had she just… groped the monster's breast? Judging by how the monster reared back from her (unfortunately without releasing its hold on Leighara's neck or knife hand) while squealing out a noise which sounded more affronted than pained, the answer was a resounding Yes. Under other circumstances, Leighara would have been sorry, but in the heat of the moment she could only feel happy that if she was going to die then she was going to die with a surprisingly nice breast in her hand.

"Let's see how you like it," growled the monster in a gravelly contralto. And now the monster finally released its hold around Leighara's neck but only so it could slide its hand lower and palm her breasts through her clothing. For all the apparent threat in the monster's voice, it applied just the right amount of pressure to not make the touch unpleasant and only ghosted its claws across the surface of the leather.

"I like it more than you might think," Leighara said. Then whatever else Leighara might have said died in her throat and her mouth dropped into a silent surprised O as she was finally able to focus on the monster's face through the obscuring curtain of hair as it loomed above her. The monster leaned in even closer with an expression equal parts quizzical and suspicious, but Leighara could only consider that to be a good thing, because it, no, she, definitely she, was _amazing_.

A short pair of ridged horns curved upward from the monster's forehead, while a second longer pair directly behind the first curved backward and slightly outward around the top of her head, while a third pair directly behind the second grew longest of all curved backward and outward even more so that they spiraled around like a ram's horns to frame her face. Leighara had been able to notice some of that during their fight. What she had not had time to notice was everything else about the monster's appearance, such as how the things which Leighara had mistaken for dark eyes in the heat of battle now appeared to be perfect little domes of black bone or horn or scale or some other hard substance growing out of the skin of her shoulders and arms like natural armor. Lines of smaller versions of those same little armor bumps sprouted above her eyes in place of eyebrows and along the ridges of her cheekbones. The monster's actual eyes were beautifully large and colored with mix of the same shades of green and brown which mottled her smooth skin. Her tousled hair, which stuck out in all directions through the protective cage of her horns, was a mix of darker greens and browns with a few stray strands of silver and coppery orange, and through that hair Leighara could see a slightly upturned nose, full lips (slightly parted to reveal the tips of too sharp teeth, but those teeth appeared to be neatly aligned and gleaming white), and a strong jaw which avoided being too blocky by sweeping forward to end in a cute little pointed chin. 

Leighara was also pleased to see that while she was drinking in the sight of the monster, the monster seemed to be assessing her in the exact way and, if the monster's small but growing smile was any indication, also liking what she saw just as much as Leighara did.

"If you kissed me before you ate me, I think I might be able to die a happy woman," Leighara breathed out without meaning to speak aloud.

That seemed to take the monster aback almost as much grabbing her breast had, but she collected herself quickly enough, and her smile spread across her face into a full toothy grin. "I suppose that can be arranged," the monster purred and once again closed the distance between the two of them, much more gently this time than she had done before.

Things progressed from there, and when the monster devoured every last inch of Leighara, it was only in the metaphorical sense, and Leighara promptly returned the favor.

When Leighara returned home the next morning, she had nothing to show for her hunt but a spring in her step and an open invitation to return to Red Mountain whenever she wished, an invitation which Leighara planned to accept just as soon as she could find another excuse to get away.

The End


End file.
